Since the Dawn of Time: A Series

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After the fall of the South African apartheid regime, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee gained access to official records documenting the individuals who presided over the censorship of his work and was surprised that they did not fit the stereotype we have of professional censors, which he describes in the following way: some nondescript male bureaucrat who comes to work punctually at 8:30 in the morning, locks his office door behind him, and spends the day going through piles of books, underlining dirty passages in red ink and stamping pass or fail on the cover, or else pouring over strips of

Slavoj Zizek in How To Read Lacan From the Lacanian perspective, what then is appearance at its most radical? Imagine a man having an affair about which his wife doesn’t know, so when he is meeting his lover, he pretends to be on a business trip or something similar; after some time, he gathers the courage and tells the wife the truth that, when he is away, he is staying with his lover. However, at this point, when the front of happy marriage falls apart, the mistress breaks down and, out of sympathy with the abandoned wife, avoids meeting her lover.

The contemporary problem of hypersexualized images in the media manifests itself for women in the experience of feeling lacking with respect to media depictions of the ideal female body. This results in a whole host of problems: low self-esteem, self-loathing, eating disorders and so on. Feminist bloggers have addressed themselves to these problems by considering it as an issue of the male gaze – a concept borrowed from Jacques Lacan – where images of women are on display for a male audience and to arouse male pleasure. I’ve slightly complicated this reading with the notion of the ideal gazer – every

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One of the most tedious features of the Silicon Valley Hype Machine is its endless repetition of progressive sounding marketing slogans about democracy and freedom, all while promoting a pro-business agenda. But it’s too easy to read this as a sinister corporate ploy to co-opt the language of activists and twisting

Just in time for the holidays, Apple’s marketing department released Misunderstood, an ad about a surly teenager absorbed in his iPhone in the midst of scenes of his family’s idyllic Christmas togetherness. But he surprises everyone when he reveals that the whole time he was making a touching video for everyone

Here’s an adage which I think is true: every theory of parenting is implicitly a theory of society. It follows that even if you aren’t a parent now, nor ever intend to be one, if you’re interested in society and culture, you ought to be interested in the topic because the